Convicted arms smuggler Viktor Bout’s defense attorney has filed a motion asking New York Judge Shira Scheindlin not to sentence him for the crime he was found guilty for several months ago: conspiring to sell anti-aircraft weapons to terrorists.

He said his arrest was all about “private politics” from “the then White House,” a reference to former U.S. President George W. Bush, in office when Bout was arrested in Thailand in March 2008.

Did the good guys go bad because of Western money, pressure, and policies?

Tales of corruption in the European Union's newest member countries Romania and Bulgaria are frequently cited as the reason they have not yet gained access to the EU's visa-free Schengen travel zone.. But Central European EU members Austria, Slovakia, and the CzechRepublic are all gripped by corruption scandals of their own as is the Union’s future member Croatia.

Now, a study just published in the American Sociological Review argues that it was the policies espoused by Western governments and institutions such as the World Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and the International Monetary Fund that led to the corruption that has come to define former communist country’s transition to democracy.

The new study, by Lawrence King, and David Stuckler, of Cambridge, and Patrick Hamm, a doctoral candidate in sociology at HarvardUniversity, explores how mass privatization negatively impacted the transitional economies’ growth.

“The more faithfully countries adopted the policy, the more they endured economic crime, corruption, and economic failure. This happened, the study argues, because the policy itself undermined the state’s functioning and exposed swathes of the economy to corruption,” says the abstract.

Or could it be that corruption was just endemic even in the former communists structures and liberalization of the economy also liberalized corruption. Throw in the criminal services industry like offshore registration agents and dodgy London lawyers who helped crooked government officials and oligarchs hide and launder their wealth and you have a recipe for a buffet of corruption.